


I'll give it all to you, anything you want, until there is nothing left that you want from me.

by mariamegale



Series: Call me 'sweetheart', please? [9]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Unrequited Love, inner monologue, non-established relationship, oh boy, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:02:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26127700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariamegale/pseuds/mariamegale
Summary: Whatever it is that Eugene gets out of this, Babe is more than happy to give it to him, for as long as Gene wants it. He’ll give the man all he wants, as long as he’s allowed to be there to give it.Babe is happy to sit in his corner and just love Eugene as much and as brightly as his little heart will let him, and one day when Eugene finds a person of his own to love, Babe is going to pull away and wish him the best.He just hopes that he’ll come out on the other side of whatever hell that that’s going to be like, which is why he’s trying to memorise every inch of Eugene’s person, because maybe it’ll help the transition. It will. It’s going to be okay, he just needs to make sure that there is no room for imagining things left in his head.He just needs to be able to say he knows everything there is to know about what Gene is like, what he feels like, how he tastes and how he sounds.
Relationships: Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe
Series: Call me 'sweetheart', please? [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722178
Comments: 9
Kudos: 36





	I'll give it all to you, anything you want, until there is nothing left that you want from me.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun times.

Babe has been acting weird for a few weeks. He knows this.

He doesn’t know if anyone else notices, but Babe sure as hell does, because he knows himself that well. He’s been acting weird, knows he has, but has no plans to stop — just hopes that it’s not noticeable and that nobody else is getting weirded out by it.

Or, well. He doesn’t really care about most people. To be completely honest, Babe only cares about one person, in more ways than one, which is kind of the reason he’s been acting weird in the first place.

Because hiding in the kitchen, watching the time on the microwave slowly tick on until Eugene is supposed to get home from work, is weird. Maybe not the “ _I wonder when my roommate will be home, because his schedule is real fucked up lately_ ” that he’s thinking, but the way Babe stands watch, his heart starting to pound in his chest every time he hears footsteps in the stairway absolutely is.

Making his roommate sleep in Babe’s room is also weird, even if Gene’s kind of intermittently done that for the last few months anyway. But lately, Babe’s started to act more and more like it’s just expected of Gene to fall into Babe’s bed instead of his own, and that’s definitely a weird twist to the whole thing.

For fuck’s sake, the other night he’d asked Eugene “ _if he was coming?_ ” after getting changed into his own pyjamas and heading to bed, and that’s just… not a question you should ever ask, especially not innocently.

But Babe had asked, and Gene hadn’t really argued more than telling Babe he was going to finish his chapter and then be right there. Curling up under the covers, Babe had listened to the quiet of the flat before it changed into listening to Eugene getting ready for bed. 

Which he had as he always did, putting whatever stray washing-up there was into the sink, brushing his teeth and then making his little sleep routine round of making sure all the lights were off and the front door closed. Babe likes hearing Gene do that, as much as some worrisome little part of Eugene’s brain must enjoy doing it, because he does it every night before he goes to bed.

Babe had lied there, heart beating when he’d heard Eugene then walk into his own bedroom, but it must’ve only been to get into his sleepwear because not two minutes later he was padding across the floor of Babe’s room to crawl in behind him on the bed.

Pretending to be less awake than he was, Babe had just rolled over to push his face into Eugene’s chest. Gene had pressed his cheek against Babe’s hair in return, wrapped his arms around him and then they’d fallen asleep like that. No questions asked, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was weird.

Almost as weird as Babe plucking Eugene’s phone out of his hands when he started to glare at the screen in that way that meant “ _I’m starting to get a bit of a headache and need a break_ ” in Eugene Speak.

Again, it wasn’t that in and by itself, because Babe’s been looking out for signs of Gene getting a headache for almost the whole time they’ve roomed together. No, the weird part was that he’d switched Gene’s focus onto Babe crawling into his lap and pressing their lips together.

Used to Babe’s antics, Eugene hadn’t protested, and instead pulled Babe closer with soft hands, letting himself be kissed about nineteen times before saying anything.

“What’s the matter, _minou_?” Eugene had asked against Babe’s lips, in that low voice of his that he got into when a potentially sexy situation presented itself.

But Babe wasn’t in it for the sex, choosing instead to kiss Gene one more time, telling him “nothing. Just wanted to check in on you.”

“Oh,” had been Eugene’s only response, one warm hand coming up to Babe’s cheek. And that’s how they’d spent twenty minutes making out on the sofa last week, and it was weird.

The way Babe bribed Gene to let him help with the cooking via kisses to the back of his neck was weird. Hijacking movie night to plaster himself against Eugene’s chest where he was lying on the sofa, burying his nose in Gene’s neck, was weird. Hiding in the kitchen and feeling his heart pound in his chest as Eugene unlocks their front door, is weird.

It’s weird, because Babe isn’t doing this for the cuddles, or the kissing, or for not having to sleep alone. He’s doing it because he’s promised himself to take as much advantage of anything and everything Eugene is willing to give him, while Gene is still offering it.

Babe gets Eugene to sleep in his bed so that he can curl around him, so that he can slot their legs together and slide a hand up under his shirt, just to feel his warm skin. He does that because he tries to make sure he remembers the feeling, counting the pace of Eugene’s heart and matching his breathing until it evens out. 

He crawls into Eugene’s lap to kiss him in the middle of the day, because he wants to make sure he knows every kind of kiss Gene is capable of giving. Babe wants to assure himself that his library of Eugene Kisses is complete, that he hasn’t missed a single edition, that he’s not going to go through life unaware of any kind of kissing that Gene has to offer. He needs to know what it’s like. 

Kind of like how Babe needs to know how Eugene feels under him, how well he fits into the nook of Gene’s neck and how safe it feels to lie there, feeling a set of gentle fingers card though his hair. How Eugene never seems to mind when Babe loses interest in whatever they’re watching, because by now he knows that Babe likes to just cozy himself up properly.

It’s weird. It’s also borderline serial killer-y, like how Babe lately hasn’t even followed up on actually joining Eugene in the cooking because he’s too busy trying to memorise the way the back of his neck smells. 

_I hear what you’re saying_ , Babe thinks to himself. Eugene has just stepped over the threshold and Babe forces himself to count to ten before walking out of the kitchen, because he doesn’t want to make his weird even more obvious. _But my counterpoint is this; I am not planning on murdering Eugene, and I know that I’ll have to let him go sometime in the future, a fact which I have accepted and assimilated into my being. Thus, as crazy as I might be, it will only hurt myself. And I’m cool with that._

Ignoring whatever that annoyed part of him tries to yell back, Babe takes a deep breath and walks out of the kitchen. Eugene is in the hall, taking his jacket off, looking both incredibly tired and incredibly happy to be off work. When he sees Babe, he breaks into a smile that seems so genuine that it sends butterflies into Babe’s stomach.

“Hi, welcome home,” Babe says, an actual skip in his step as he goes over there to press a kiss to Gene’s mouth. He hopes that the skipping makes this seem more normal than it is, like it’s less ‘my roommate kisses me hello like a lunatic’ and more ‘Babe is being Babe again.’

It seems to work, because one hand at Babe’s waist pulls him into a whole series of kisses. He giggles into them at the same time as Eugene seems to melt into the whole thing, and Babe tries to turn his laughter into a sympathetic humming noise instead.

“Long day?” He asks, only getting a groan in response. Eugene leans his head against Babe’s shoulder like he wants Babe to just support all his weight at this moment. Babe coos at him, scratching his fingernails over the nape of Gene’s neck in that way that Babe knows sends shivers down his spine.

He gets an arm around Gene’s waist, gently pulling him down the hall. “Come on, you big doctor man, let’s get you off your feet, yeah?”

Eugene doesn’t even bother to mutter back both his and Spina’s trademark “ _not a doctor yet,_ ” which is a shame. Babe loves reminding him that in literally everybody’s eyes, both him and Ralph are absolutely, one hundred percent doctors at this point. Residency or not, get fucked, they get paid to work in a hospital. They’re fucking doctors.

Babe busies himself with this train of thought that he almost misses to realise that both of them apparently decide that the couch can get fucked, heading towards Babe’s bedroom instead. But he does realise, and the butterflies move to the pit of his stomach instead.

Oh, okay, sure, yeah. He hadn’t planned on things taking this turn, but as Eugene lets them pause so that Babe can gently crowd him up against the wall to kiss him deeper, Babe decides he’s fine with it. 

In fact, he’s so much more than fine with it, already feeling his nerves frizzle after the fifteen or so minutes he spent staring at their microwave clock waiting for Gene to get home so he could kiss him welcome. He’d really, really like to be able to put all that energy into something productive. Something that’ll make Eugene feel better. Besides, this is another thing he desperately wants to memorise.

Out of all the things Babe’s going to miss sorely one day, it’s sad to say that the sex is really going to be one of the biggest ones, isn’t there? But here’s the thing, see; while Babe can’t tell for sure whether all the other things he loves about Eugene will be as good with someone else, he has a lot more experience in the sex department of things. And he’s never had sex this good, so unless he’s just been unlucky twenty three times in a row, Eugene and him just have something exceptionally good going on here.

The day Gene decides he’s had enough of this, holy shit is Babe going to miss the sex.

And that’s the final point that always gets that inner voice from earlier to shut up, because Babe knows that Eugene will, one day, decide to walk away. Babe might be in love, but Eugene isn’t, and that means that unless this suddenly turns into a romcom and he manages to pull some “10 days” shit, Gene is de facto going to put a stop to this.

Babe isn’t an idiot. He’s in love, has been for a long while, and in the month or so that’s passed since he realised that, he’s had some mental sit-downs with himself. Because when he first realised, it had seemed very cut-and-dry, assuming that this thing between them might have been more than it was.

But he’s not an idiot, and his non-idiot brain soon realised that, well. Eugene doesn’t exactly… Do non-serious things, and as emotionally solid the man might be sometimes, Babe doesn’t think he’s the kind of weirdo who believes himself to be dating someone for some seven-odd months and never mentions it in conversation.

Hell, in all this time, Babe doesn’t think that Gene once has even off-handedly mentioned the words ‘date,’ ‘relationship’ and/or ‘boyfriend.’ Which means he’s either a nutcase, or just hasn’t considered Babe or what they’ve been doing to be either of those things.

They’ve lived together for a long time. During all these years, Eugene has told Babe about his dating experiences: A few one-night-stands, and three very long-term relationships. As in, ‘a couple years’ long-term relationships. Hell, Babe was there for one of them; a very nice young man that Gene had ended up going through a mutual breakup with because the guy wanted to move to the other coast, and Eugene just couldn’t make a long-distance thing work with his then-insane amount of school.

It had been about a year into the two of them being roommates, and Eugene had told Babe about it one day like it was the most normal thing in the world. Sure, he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, but being on-brand with his insanely practical way of dealing with things, he got over it after a few weeks and a alcohol-heavy Grey’s Anatomy marathon with Ralph and Renee.

Babe had learned that apparently, that’s how medical students deal with emotional turmoil, and he’d been a supportive roommate. Within a month everything was back to normal, and apart from Gene spending more time at home and less time with someone else, not much had really changed in Babe’s part of it all.

The difference was stark to how Babe could be a mess for weeks over something that only lasted sixteen days, and most often wasn’t even an actual relationship to begin with.

(He has been informed that going on a grand total of two dates in three weeks because the other guy kept cancelling last minute, for example, doesn’t count as a relationship. 

Neither does crashing at some guy’s house for a couple of days and doing pretty much nothing but fuck until you got kicked out, either. There hadn’t even been that many cuddles, because the guy “ _wasn’t into that stuff_.”

And apparently, “ _but I met his parents_ ” doesn’t hold water if what happened was that you ran into his parents at Walmart, and he responded by shoving you into a shelf of tinned tomatoes in his haste to put some distance between the two of you so that they wouldn’t see him together with another boy.

There was also the time— okay, Edward, getting off track. He had a point. Right.)

He still cried every time, sometimes into his bowl of ice cream, usually on Eugene’s shoulder, because Eugene is a great roommate. He’d never seemed to look down on Babe for it, either, which he greatly appreciated.

Babe doesn’t do things half-way. Whether it’s sex, or work, or a movie marathon, if he decides to commit to something, by God does he commit. He likes that about himself. It’s also meant that he gets very serious about things like relationships very quickly, and then becomes devastated if (when) it doesn’t work out. 

Like he’s thought before: There’s a reason he’s single. He’s accepted this.

Really, the weirdest thing of all is that it took him so fucking long to realise that he was falling for Eugene. He should probably go to therapy and sort out that at some point, because what the fuck.

Anyway, in stark contrast to Babe, who gets one phone number and is then gone, Eugene is… Well. Let’s just say that the kind of people Eugene goes for does not Venn Diagram with the kind of person that Babe is.

From what he’s been able to tell, Eugene’s type is people who are like him. Calm, determined, with ideas for what they want and a plan on how to get there. People who know who they are, where they stand, where they want to stand in the future. People that Gene can hold a reasonable discussion with, instead of just consisting of one of them telling facts to another, very fascinated person.

Babe doesn’t know what the fuck he wants to do with his life. He doesn’t even live in the moment like those kind-of-cool, kind-of-massive-pricks ‘traveler’ people, no, he just straight up doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing half the time. 

He hasn’t gone to school, has no real want to do that in the future, doesn’t see himself working at this kind of dead-end job forever but also doesn’t really have any huge ideas on where he would rather be forever, either. He had a life crisis at the age of nineteen because he realised that Jesus wasn’t gonna stare over his shoulder if he jerked off in the shower, and was such a sheltered kid that Toye was legitimately his first time meeting someone who spoke Spanish.

Right now he’s just happy that he’s happy, hanging out with his friends and maybe planning to travel to Chicago sometime because he really doesn’t believe their fucking hot dogs to be that superior.

No, Eugene doesn’t do casual shit — and doesn’t even seem to want to, Babe has seen him go for months without getting laid with nothing more than a shrug and a “I’m more in it for them than the sex, you know? And I haven’t found someone, is all” — but what they have got going on is clearly not anything more than casual, either. So what the fuck is it?

Convenience? It doesn’t seem horribly likely to Babe, but it’s honestly the best explanation he has. Hell, he doesn’t have a good one for what his own reasons were, except that he likes sex, and learned that he likes having sex with Eugene, and knew he didn’t have to worry about any bad stuff because it was Gene. He just wasn’t expecting to fall in love like a bird flying into a pane of glass.

So maybe that’s what it is for Eugene too, minus the whole love part. Maybe Eugene just realised that he thinks having sex with Babe is fun, and maybe he realised he kinda liked cuddling and sharing a bed, too.

Babe doesn’t have to scratch his head over that one, he’s just fucking happy for Eugene’s sake that he finally realised that hugging your friends is the fucking best. Not that Gene really snuggles with any of his other friends, as far as Babe knows, but then again Babe doesn’t fuck any of his other friends either.

Whatever it is that Eugene gets out of this, Babe is more than happy to give it to him, for as long as Gene wants it. He’ll give the man all he wants, as long as he’s allowed to be there to give it. Babe is happy to sit in his corner and just love Eugene as much and as brightly as his little heart will let him, and one day when Eugene finds a person of his own to love, Babe is going to pull away and wish him the best.

He just hopes that he’ll come out on the other side of whatever hell that that’s going to be like, which is why he’s trying to memorise every inch of Eugene’s person, because maybe it’ll help the transition. It will. It’s going to be okay, he just needs to make sure that there is no room for imagining things left in his head. He needs to be able to say he knows everything there is to know about what Gene is like, what he feels like, how he tastes and how he sounds.

Which is why Babe is currently leaning their bodies together, gently pressing Eugene into this wall, kissing him like his life depends on it, trying to focus on the way Gene’s tongue feels against his own. Gene makes these little sighing noises when Babe kisses him like this, and he loves every one of them.

Eugene has one hand on the back of Babe’s head, the other on his waist, holding him close. When Babe rolls his hips, it draws a groan from Gene that makes him feel like he both wants to push himself closer and drag them away from this wall and into a bed at the same time.

Making the decision for them, Gene gently shoves himself off the wall, tugging Babe after him into the bedroom. Babe wastes no time getting Eugene on his back on the mattress, crawling on top of him to latch their mouths back together. Gene’s hands push up the back of Babe’s shirt, and they feel soft and firm against his skin.

He pulls away to press a line of kisses along his cheek, biting at the side of Gene’s jaw in that way that makes Eugene groan and turn his head. Babe huffs out his laughter against Eugene’s skin, nipping at his earlobe next.

“What do you want?” Babe asks, moving until he’s lying on his side next to him, giving him a better angle to hold himself up on one elbow while running the fingers of his free hand over Eugene’s stomach. “Tell me what you want, Genie.”

“Babe,” is all Eugene responds to that, and Babe kisses him again. His hand goes down to the hem of Gene’s shirt, pushing it up a little so that he can rub over the soft skin at the bottom of Gene’s abdomen.

“I’m here, you got me,” he says back with a smile, pressing one of his legs in between Eugene’s. His hand moves lower, down over the bulge in Gene’s trousers, kissing his neck when it makes Gene moan. “Do you want me to take care of you? You’ve had a long day, it’s okay, want me to be good for you for a little bit?”

Eugene’s eyes are closed, his brows drawn into a small frown, but his fingers are soft and trembling where they card through Babe’s hair and his hips roll into the way Babe is gently massaging his dick. “Babe, I…”

“What is it?” Babe asks, pushing his forehead against Eugene’s temple, where his skin is the smoothest despite all the rubbing it gets when Gene is frustrated or stressed about something. “Tell me, Genie, tell me what you want, wanna give you everything.”

“Edward,” Eugene suddenly gets out, and that feels weird, since fucking when— “Edward, stop, I can’t, stop.”

Babe pulls back immediately, hurries to untangle them so that they won’t accidentally smack each other when Eugene sits up. He puts his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands over his face, and Babe feels like he might get a stomach ache from how worried that move makes him.

“Eugene? Can you talk to me? What’s wrong?” Trying desperately to remember what the fuck to do in these situations, Babe ends up just crawling over and kneeling down next to Eugene. Close, but not touching, that’s smart, he thinks.

“I’m sorry, nothing, I just…” Gene says, taking a deep, slow breath. Babe carefully puts a hand on his back, rubbing it up and down when Eugene seems to relax a little under it. “I just can’t. Do this.”

“That’s okay, we don’t have to do anything, of course, are you—“ 

“No, Babe,” Eugene interrupts him, putting his hands down and looking over at Babe in a way that just nails him to the ground. “I can’t do… This, any more. I’m sorry, I just… Can’t.”

“Oh.” Babe is going to sink through the ground. Gene can be as vague as he wants, but Babe knows what a non-break-up conversation sounds like when he hears it. He forces himself to short-circuit his brain, because he absolutely cannot afford to sink through the ground until this conversation is done. “Did anything happen? I just—“

“You didn’t do anything, no, that’s not…” Eugene closes his eyes for a second, and when he opens them again, his face is very carefully composed in that way Babe hates. He hates it, because he can’t tell what the fuck Gene is thinking, and if there was ever a moment that he desperately wanted to know what Gene is thinking— “I just don’t think…”

“That we should keep doing this,” Babe fills in for him, forcing himself to nod like he understands. He isn’t sure he does. “I just wanna make sure, because we were… You know. That nothing bad happened, yeah? That we’re… That I didn’t, you know?”

“Babe,” Eugene says, putting a thumb and finger under Babe’s chin. “You’re perfect. Trust me. If you did something, anything, that would make me… I’d tell you. Promise. I just wanna make sure I don’t… I don’t want you to feel like I ever… Overstepped. With any of this.”

“You could never,” Babe says, forcing himself to smile gently at Eugene, because his hand is still trembling a little, like he’s worried, and they can’t have that. “Gene, it’s okay, I promise. I get it. We’re big boys, yeah? It wasn’t a big deal starting this, it doesn’t have to be a big deal ending it. This stuff, it can get messy, you know?”

“It can,” Eugene says, dragging his eyes over Babe’s face in a way that makes Babe’s stomach sink a little, pulling his hand away. “I’m— God, there is no good way to have this conversation.”

That’s something Babe can find an excuse to laugh at, and it’s good, because if he didn’t do something right now he’d probably explode. “There really isn’t. ‘This stuff can get messy,’ Eugene, I just said that. I really am a poet at heart. I should put that into a book.”

“Well, it’s not wrong,” Eugene says, but he does it with a smile, just for a second before biting on his bottom lip with a headshake. “I was the one who sprung this into the middle of that, not a good way to make you feel like there wasn’t a problem.”

Babe laughs again. “Eh, you’ve convinced me. You have a good track record of telling the truth, Gene, don’t worry about me.”

Eugene huffs out a laugh of his own, and Babe forces himself to keep his smile on his face. They sit in silence for a few moments, and once again Babe feels like he’s going to combust if he doesn’t do anything.

And by ‘do anything,’ he specifically means ‘get one of them out of this situation, because I have been shell shocked, and I don’t know how long I have until the actual breakdown hits me.’

So he squeezes Eugene’s shoulder and says, “Eugene, seriously, it’s okay. Just give me a day to re-learn your personal space. And for God’s sake, go lie down for a while, you’ve looked like you’re about to keel over ever since you got home.”

“Thanks,” Gene says sarcastically, but squeezes Babe’s hand anyway before he gets up from the bed.

As he’s leaving, Babe feels the need to say something, do something, anything. Anything to make this fucking idiot awkward bullshit go away between them, anything that feels fucking normal. So he leans back on his elbow, tilts his head to the side and grins before opening his mouth again.

“Hey, Gene,” he calls, watching Eugene’s eyebrows rise when he sees the look on Babe’s face.

“Yes, Edward?” It’s said in that dry voice he gets when Babe does something and he acts mock-annoyed about it.

“When you say that I was perfect, is that something I’m free to put on my resume? I’m just thinking for the future—“

Eugene rolls his eyes so hard it’s almost audible. “Good night, Edward,” Eugene says, and Babe snickers as he walks down the hall to his own room.

Then he leans fully down on his back, hearing the door to Gene’s room close, and gives himself exactly ten seconds to lie still before he has to do anything. There’s a part of him that wonders if he just willed this whole thing into existence, and comes to the conclusion that well, it would make sense if he did, he guesses.

He doesn’t know what to do now. The silence of his bedroom feels deafening, in part because it matches the weird stillness going on in his own head. He wants to go over their conversation, try to figure out exactly what just happened, but he has a hard time thinking about it.

Babe wonders if this is what it feels like to see a grenade go off next to you, in those moments after you’ve only just made out the fact that you think you’re still alive and nothing else. _I didn’t get to kiss him goodbye_ , he thinks, and is surprised at how little that matters to him as he reaches for his phone.

Maybe it worked, maybe he actually did manage to vaccinate himself from feeling horrible about this. But then he goes to text his sister, because she’s the only one he has an emergency ‘call me’ deal with who will probably not be at work right now, and his fingers are trembling. _Well, at least I got to hear him call me one more French pet name before it was over._

It’s only when she responds with ‘ _hey, u ok? can i call in two?’_ that he gets a lump in his throat, staring at the little question with a breathing that gets increasingly unsteady. 

_No, Bella, I don’t think so,_ he thinks to himself, forcing some control over his lungs as he counts the seconds until she calls with an excuse to get him the fuck out of here, _I think I just had my heart broken, and you don’t even know about it, because I didn’t tell you before that I was even fucking— yeah, have fun with this one, good luck, also please help me because I think I might be dying_.

The fucking hubris he had, thinking he was ever going to be capable to deal with this, he’s going to have to do like that other man and move across the fucking continent before he—

Babe’s phone calls, and he could cry when he picks up and hears his baby sister’s gentle, kind voice rant out some bullshit about being at the police station.

Really, Babe didn’t know what ‘weird’ looked like, as he plays into whatever charade Bella is handing him and all but running out the door, hoping to dear God that Eugene doesn’t find this fucking suspicious. 

How the fuck is he going to survive living with Eugene for the next… however long, holy fucking shit, he doesn’t know what he’s gonna fucking do. So he babbles down the line, runs, and tries not to cry until he’s out of the building.

———

Of course, what Babe also doesn’t know is that on the other side of a wall, Eugene is currently curled up on his bead with his palms pressed against the sides of his head. It’s like he believes that the pressure will keep all the bad thoughts away, like there’s a barrier put up that nothing unpleasant could ever get through.

He hasn’t done this since he was a child and one of the kids in his class had gotten one of her legs thrashed up after falling out of her cousin’s boat in alligator waters. He couldn’t sleep for weeks, invaded by the fear of gleaming eyes and sharp teeth.

But this time, it’s not images of the murky waters of the bayou trying to get into his skull, it’s the panic that’s been trying to crawl it’s way inside him ever since Babe had asked him what he wanted, and Eugene realised that he was kind of potentially fucking both himself and someone up for the rest of their lives.

How the fuck did he let this happen? How the fuck did he not pull the breaks on this whole thing sooner, the fucking second he realised? Jesus Christ, he’s been taking advantage of someone for weeks, probably even longer than that, and then smacked him in the face with a goddamned “we need to talk” conversation in the middle of—

Eugene presses his hands closer, focusing on the way his arms are starting to tremble from the strain, curling his face in under his pillows in order to take a few painfully deep breaths without Babe hearing him. Hopefully.

He knows what anxiety looks like when he sees it, but he also doesn’t know what the fuck to do about it. Babe is literally next door, hopefully buying Eugene’s weird bullshit excuse to stop sleeping together, and if Gene freaks out right now there is no way Babe isn’t going to find out. If that happens, he’ll definitely have fucked it up.

So he takes his breaths, closes his eyes, and rolls over on his back to stretch his arms out over his own head, and he tries to stay fucking calm. In a few hours, he can make up some excuse, leave and go to Ralph or Renee’s place — and won’t this be a hoot to explain, Christ, he’s such an idiot. 

But they’ll let him in, he tells himself, and he can spend the whole night and all of tomorrow taking on as many shifts as he can without making his supervisor suspicious. It’s okay. People want out of their work all the time, there’ll be more than enough chances to cover, and then he hopefully won’t have time to think, or any expectation to act normal, because he never acts normal when he works that much anyway. 

Somewhere in the middle of this inner rambling monologue, Eugene realises Babe is talking to someone. He can’t make it out, until Babe walks past Gene’s door, letting him catch just “ _God, Bella, don’t worry, just gonna leave Gene a note—_ “ as Babe walks past him.

He should go out there, check on Babe, check if Bella’s okay, but Gene doesn’t have it in him. All he does is think _oh Christ, please, please go, please tell me he’s leaving_ , pressing a hand to his mouth to be able to better hear Babe move about the apartment.

There’s a massive pang of guilt in his chest when the front door slams shut behind Babe after no longer than sixty seconds, because that means that whatever it was, it must’ve been urgent. Babe doesn’t hurry, not for anything in the world, not ever, but now he did.

And here lies Eugene, heart pounding with happiness that Babe isn’t there, because it means he can shove his face into a pillow and make a noise he’s only heard people make in the ER.

How could he be this stupid, to think he could get away with any of this. 

_What comes around, goes around,_ the voice in his head says, but it doesn’t sound like his grandmother, as it usually does. It sounds like Babe, like he’s remembering a giddy and fucked-out Babe Heffron whispering it in his ear. 

Eugene presses his hands back over his ears. He doesn’t know what else to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't hate me. Fun fact, I've never written angst before, I think, so if this is shit angst I will gladly take any criticism you guys have to toss at me.
> 
> I cannot thank my lovely [Anthrobrat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrobrat) enough, for being a fantastic person and friend, and for being the one to originally write the sentence "Babe is happy to sit in his corner and just love Eugene as much and as brightly as his little heart will let him, and one day when Eugene finds a person of his own to love" which, not gonna lie, kinda inspired this whole thing.
> 
> [By the by, we have a public Band of Brothers discord server](https://discord.gg/fFDsYv7), if any of you want to join and chat BoB and other fun stuff <3 
> 
> as always, [i also have a tumblr if u wanna send me something](https://mariamegale.tumblr.com/) specifically. you know the drill. talk kink, talk feels, talk fluff, talk whatever honestly. i love hearing from you <3
> 
> oh, also like, i fucking triple-dog promise you this is gonna have a happy ending. lol i would _not_ do unresolved angst to you. and we're not far off now!


End file.
